


ticket stubs and your diaries

by sunriises



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Short, Xerxes | Cselkcess, angst?? angst, if there is no canon compliant xerxes content i will make it myself, pov you are 14 and discovering you've been forcibly removed from your culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28969371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunriises/pseuds/sunriises
Summary: Alphonse Elric is almost fifteen. He will never know Xerxes.
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Van Hohenheim
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32





	ticket stubs and your diaries

**Author's Note:**

> title from: bastille - things we lost in the fire  
> \--  
> originally this story was going to be from ed pov but. i decided 2 go with al  
> also al gets to say fuck but only once. its ok hes powerful enough w/ or w/o it  
> uhh hope you like it

Alphonse Elric is almost fifteen. He will never know Xerxes.

He realizes this quickly, too quickly; it takes him about the same length of time to understand the crushing weight the new, unwanted knowledge comes with.

Dad had said that it was advanced; maybe, if he and Brother had grown up there, Mom might not have died. And even if she had, maybe someone would have made it impossible for them to-

_(The thing in the basement, Mom and not at the same time, wheezing through not-fully-there lungs, how did he get into armor, what did you do, whatdidyoudowhatdidyoudowhatdidyoudo)_

-try and bring her back.

But all of that pales in comparison to the knowledge that he’ll never fucking _know_.

He’ll never be able to reach through time and find himself surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins in everything that matters. He’ll never be able to pick up hedgehogs and place them back outside in the sand, or watch bats travel to wherever it is they’re going just as the night begins to darken. 

There will always be a part of him - _half_ of him - that he will never get to learn or explore.

It would be easy to blame Dad, the fellow alchemist - because there’s no way the bespectacled man doesn’t at least suspect that his sons share his insatiable curiosity. (Brother’s metal limbs and the absence of his body are proof enough of that curiosity.)

And still he told them nothing of Xerxes. 

It would be even easier, though, to blame the father of the Homunculi, the one who destroyed the kingdom in the first place.

Maybe if he could consciously register anything beyond the inexplicable, obscure loss, the almost-nostalgia sitting where the space between his ribs should be, he would sympathize with Scar a little more in this moment.

(Because it’s too easy to imagine himself in Scar’s place, bearing witness to the destruction of his people.)

The hardest choice, and the one he knows he must make, is to blame nobody at all: to keep moving forward and keep the country he’s learned to call home from suffering the same fate as the country he never got the chance to.

He is almost fifteen, and he wants to cry out of missing something he’s never known.

But he can’t.

“Still awake?” Dad asks, not unkindly.

A beat of silence.

“Yeah,” Al murmurs in response.


End file.
